9 Tips for Website Localization

Getting website localization right requires planning and proper execution. To make sure your localization efforts are rewarded, read through this guide.

Know your target market

Like a great comedian, figure out who your target market is. There’s no point in localizing or translating your site into the world’s top 100 languages. Instead, figure out where most of your traffic comes from. You can these stats from tools like Google Analytics or Alexa.

MongoDB‘s global traffic from Alexa shows a demand for localization into Chinese.

Get translations right

Having high quality, professional human translations is critical. Google Translate is usually not enough. Poorly translated content can negatively affect your business.

Google Translate is useful as a first pass, but translating your content professional is a must.

Make sure you have quality translations.

To see how machine translation can’t be trusted, check out Translation Party. It takes a sentence and translates it into multiple languages and then back to its original language. The result is surprising.

Utilize high quality online translation services

Having high quality, professional human translations is key. But getting them shouldn’t be a complicated or cumbersome inefficient process. It should be as easy as a click of a button.

With Localize, we made it a top priority to make ordering professional translations as easy as possible.

There are plenty of high quality website translation services out there that make professional translation scalable and affordable. We’ve partnered with a few to do our translations. Check out Angel List’s top translation startups list.

PRO TIP: Localize makes ordering business quality translations painless. Just a click of a button.

Make content management painless

Having your site translated is great. But making sure that changes to your content are always reflected in the translated version of your website is difficult. Localization is a continuous process.

This is one of the reasons we built Localize. Content management, content detection, and content awareness should be automated. We’ve made it easy to turn localization in to a continuous process rather than a 1-time project.

It’s hard enough to write good content and copy, the last thing you need is for your team to remember what elements, what links, and what content has been changed every time you release a new version of your product.

Make language selection easy

If a user is new to your site, they should never have to look very long to discover whether there is a translated version of your website. Make it easy for them to find what languages you support.

Airbnb is a great example of a service that’s made their localized website accessible and easy for its users. The translated site is easy to find, and the translations are high quality. It drives them traffic and makes their customers happier.

Check out the bottom of the Airbnb website. They provide an easy way to switch language and currency.

Nike also does a great job of letting users select their language and region. This cleans up the UI/UX so their users aren’t overwhelmed or lost.

Louis Vuitton does a great job of caching users preference for future visits to their website. Your users should never have to specify their language preference more than once.

Erica Parrot makes it super straightforward for users to select what language they want to use. It’s clean and simple.

Pictures speak a thousand words

Website localization is more than just translating your content. Don’t neglect the images on your website. Again, Airbnb does a fantastic job of building their landing page images to account for local language and currency differences.

To take your localization to the next level, make sure that links, headers, and titles don’t break when switching to a different language.

Evernote does a great job with contextualizing it’s landing page to cater pictures to the specific language by translating the text in their images as well.

PRO TIP: Get in touch with us about how to setup image translation with Localize.

Localized UI/UX is critical to global success

The key to good localization is to make sure that your website works and looks just as good as it does in its original language. The user experience should be equal in all languages.

When designing your website, create a UI that accounts for the fact that the length of a phrase can be much longer or much shorter in other languages. Drinksonus.com does a great job of creating UI/UX that works well in all of the languages they support.

Designing UI/UX elements that look great in multiple languages is key.

Vice does a great job at localizing their web media content to a multiple regions and languages. The basic elements of the site continue to be similar, but both the content and the assets delivered for each region is different and unique.

Square designs it’s landing page to cater towards its regional audiences. Making sure that both the text and the images look well together.

Louis Vuitton once again does an excellent job of catering its homepage to their international users. The text fits properly and the design motif of the brand stays consistent across all their locales and languages.

Localization has positive ROI

The ROI of localization can be extremely high if done right. You’re reaching whole new markets by offering your product in more languages.

If you’ve followed the last fews tips for optimizing your content, images, and design, you’re already off to a great start. Borderfree.com has a great breakdown of how localization can have a huge ROI.

Transifex also has a great infographic on localization

The key to getting a ROI on localization is in ensuring that the quality is high, and that your cost of localization is reasonable.

If you’ve already signed up for Localize and have questions about integration, check out this guide.

Embrace website localization!

Localizing your site to another language is a big step. You’re expanding your business globally. Be your own advocates of localization. It’s good for business and it makes your website or product more universal. You might just get a high ROI from it!